I am trying to get my Arduino Uno to communicate with Processing in order to use my Kinect Sensor, and ran in to trouble passing data from the Processing to the Uno. I tried running a basic sketch to change the brightness of an LED based on the serial input, and got some unusual results. No matter what I type into the Serial Monitor, Serial.read() returns -1. Please help!

You are printing each character as a decimal number. Each character is represented using ASCII code. Look up an ASCII table on Google. You'll find that the character for 1 is represented by the decimal number 49.Changing "int input" to "byte input" will cause the variable to be printed as a character instead of as a decimal number.

I don't know why I had that. Thanks. So that solved my main problem of the Arduino not talking to Processing (silly me). Now this is probably a really stupid question, but how do I get the serial input to read integers (i.e. values from 0 - 255)?